him through the glass.

Many of the postmasters along this road were Jews; and I am compelled to say that they were always the greatest scoundrels we had to deal with; and this is placing them on very high ground, for their inferiors in rascality would be accounted masters in any other country. No men can bear a worse character than the Russian Jews, and I can truly say that I found them all they were represented to be. They are not allowed to come within the territory of old Russia. Peter the Great refused their application to be permitted to approach nearer, smoothing his refusal by telling them that his Russian subjects were greater Jews than they were themselves. The sagacious old monarch, however, was wrong; for all the money business along the road is in their hands. They keep little taverns, where they sell vodka, a species of brandy, and wring from the peasant all his earnings, lending the money again to the seigneurs at exorbitant interest. Many of them are rich, and though alike despised by rich and poor, by the seigneur and the serf, they are proud of exhibiting their wealth, particularly in the jewels and ornaments of their women. At Savonka, a little village on the confines of old Poland, where we were detained waiting for horses, I saw a young girl about sixteen, a Polonese, sitting on the steps of a miserable little tavern, sewing together some ribands, with a headdress of brown cloth, ornamented with gold chains and pearls worth six hundred rubles, diamond earrings worth a hundred, and a necklace of ducats and other Dutch gold pieces worth four hundred rubles; altogether, in our currency, worth perhaps two hundred and fifty dollars.

Here, too, while sitting with Henri on the steps of the posthouse, I asked him in a friendly way how he could be such a rascal as to league with the postmaster to detain us at Vosnezeuski, whereupon he went at once into French heroics, exclaiming, "Monsieur, je suis vieux militaire—j'etais chasseur de Napoleon—mon honneur," &c.; that he had never travelled before except with grand seigneurs, and then in the carriage, more as compagnon de voyage than as a servant, and intimated that it was a great condescension to travel with us at all.

We passed through several villages, so much alike and so uninteresting in appearance that I did not note even their names. As night approached we had great apprehensions that Henri would contrive to make us stop again; but the recollection of his bed on the box served as a lesson, and we rolled on without interruption. At daylight we awoke, and found ourselves upon the wild steppes of Russia, forming part of the immense plain which, beginning in northern Germany, extends for hundreds of miles, having its surface occasionally diversified by ancient tumuli, and terminates at the long chain of the Urals, which, rising like a wall, separates them from the equally vast plains of Siberia. The whole of this immense plain was covered with a luxuriant pasture, but bare of trees like our prairie lands, mostly uncultivated, yet everywhere capable of producing the same wheat which now draws to the Black Sea the vessels of Turkey, Egypt, and Italy, making Russia the granary of the Levant; and which, within the last year, we have seen brought six thousand miles to our own doors. Our road over these steppes was in its natural state; that is to say, a mere track worn by caravans of wagons; there were no fences, and sometimes the route was marked at intervals by heaps of stones, intended as guides when the ground should be covered with snow. I had some anxiety about our carriage; the spokes of the wheels were all strengthened and secured by cords wound tightly around them, and interlaced so as to make a network; but the postillions were so perfectly reckless as to the fate of the carriage, that every crack went through me like a shot. The breaking of a wheel would have left us perfectly helpless in a desolate country, perhaps more than a hundred miles from any place where we could get it repaired. Indeed, on the whole road to Chioff there was not a single place where we could have any material injury repaired; and the remark of the old traveller is yet emphatically true, that "there be small succour in these parts."

Tumuli on the Steppes.

At about nine o'clock we whirled furiously into a little village, and stopped at the door of the posthouse. Our wheels were smoking with the rapidity of their revolutions; Henri dashed a bucket of water over them to keep them from burning, and half a dozen men whipped them off and greased them. Indeed, greasing the wheels is necessary at every post, as otherwise the hubs become dry, so that there is actual danger of their taking fire; and there is a traveller's story told (but I do not vouch for its truth) of a postillion, wagon, and passengers being all burned up on the road to Moscow by the ignition of the wheels.

The village, like all the others, was built of wood, plastered and whitewashed, with roofs of thatched straw, and the houses were much cleaner than I expected to find them. We got plenty of fresh milk; the bread, which to the traveller in those countries is emphatically the staff of life, we found good everywhere in Russia, and at Moscow the whitest I ever saw. Henri was an enormous feeder, and, wherever we stopped, he disappeared for a moment, and came out with a loaf of bread in his hand and his mustache covered with the froth of quass, a Russian small beer. He said he was not always so voracious, but his seat was so hard, and he was so roughly shaken, that eating did him no good.

Resuming our journey, we met no travellers. Occasionally we passed large droves of cattle, but all the way from Odessa the principal objects were long trains of wagons, fifty or sixty together, drawn by oxen, and transporting merchandise toward Moscow or grain to the Black Sea. Their approach was indicated at a great distance by immense clouds of dust, which gave us timely notice to let down our curtains and raise our glasses. The wagoners were short, ugly-looking fellows, with huge sandy mustaches and beards, black woolly caps, and sheepskin jackets, the wool side next the skin; perhaps, in many cases, transferred warm from the back of one animal to that of the other, where they remained till worn out or eaten up by vermin. They had among them blacksmiths and wheelwrights, and spare wheels, and hammer, and tools, and everything necessary for a journey of several hundred miles. Half of them were generally asleep on the top of their loads, and they encamped at night in caravan style, arranging the wagons in a square, building a large fire, and sleeping around it. About midday we saw clouds gathering afar off in the horizon, and soon after the rain began to fall, and we could see it advancing rapidly over the immense level till it broke over our heads, and in a few moments passed off, leaving the ground smoking with exhalations.

Late in the afternoon we met the travelling equipage of a seigneur returning from Moscow to his estate in the country. It consisted of four carriages, with six or eight horses each. The first was a large, stately, and cumbrous vehicle, padded and cushioned, in which, as we passed rapidly by, we caught a glimpse of a corpulent Russian on the back seat, with his feet on the front, bolstered all around with pillows and cushions, almost burying every part of him but his face, and looking the very personification of luxurious indulgence; and yet probably, that man had been a soldier, and slept many a night on the bare ground, with no covering but